Patricia Volk
(b. 1943)

Patricia Volk came to her writing career in a roundabout way. The daughter of a restaurant owner and a family therapist, Volk had originally studied graphic design at Syracuse University and the School of Visual Arts. She then launched a career in advertising that lasted for more than two decades. As an art director, Volk created award-winning advertising campaigns for such diverse clients as Weight Watchers and Hershey's.

In the late 1980s, Volk decided to pursue a full-time writing career. Her first major work, the novel White Light, was published in 1987. The book was praised for its good-natured humor and its quirky characters. Encouraged by the response to her novel, Volk published a volume of short stories, All It Takes, in 1990. Both books featured female characters that were smart, funny, and dissatisfied with their lives.

In the 1990s, Volk took time off from writing books to teach at Yeshiva University, Playwright's Horizon Theater School, and Marymount College. Then, in 2001, Volk returned to the bookshelves with the memoir Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family. The book attracted praise for its warm, funny style and its cast of eccentric characters, all members of Volk's family. "I saw a whole generation suddenly disappearing and I wanted to get their stories down before they died," Volk explained in an interview with Boldtype Online Magazine. Some of these relatives had attained fame, like her grandfather Jake, a well-known demolition expert. Others were less well known, like Granny Ethel, who "braked with such finesse it was impossible to tell the moment the car went from moving to a stop." Some of the personalities from her family were so vividly drawn that Volk says her mother "took to bed for five days after the book came out." As an added bonus, Stuffed includes several delicious recipes from her family's many decades in the restaurant business.

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